The agency said Goldman Sachs at the behest of a customer created an investment that the customer bet would fail. It then sold the product to other customers – without disclosing information that investors might like to know. Like, “This product was created by someone who thinks it’s eventually going to be worth less than the paper it is written on.”

As it turned out, the customer who created the product made billions, while investors who bought the product – such as pension funds – lost big. And we saw that when those investors lost big, it rippled throughout the global economy, even to New Jersey, where the unemployment rate is 9.8 percent.

It was symbolic of the casino games that Wall Street was playing with Main Street’s assets. The New York Times reported [3]that Goldman Sachs in a letter said, “Although Goldman Sachs held various positions in residential mortgage-related products in 2007, our short positions were not a ‘bet against our clients.’ ” Instead, the trades were used to hedge other trading positions.

On Wall Street, that’s an important distinction. On Main Street, I’m not sure anyone sees the difference.

Until the SEC filed its lawsuit on Friday, the whole game appeared to be, if not ethical, at least legal. It was like watching, I don’t know, the Los Angeles Lakers bully some poor team, elbowing, punching, grabbing, for any advantage at all, while the referees gave your team a technical foul for arguing.

And then Lakers coach Phil Jackson would have a press conference and smugly complain about the officiating.

So I don’t know if anyone in the world can decipher the investment product Goldman Sachs sold, much less get a guilty verdict. It even might have been perfectly legal. But at least the U.S. government doesn’t think so anymore.